After two past appearances on the Booker Prize shortlist, Damon Galgut said that winning the award was simply “a lottery”. Third time around, his numbers came up.
The Promise, Galgut’s multi-generational novel about a white South African family navigating the transition from apartheid, is the winner of this year’s £50,000 prize.
Maya Jasanoff, chair of the judges, called the book a “tour de force” and said it told 40 years of South African history “in an incredibly well-wrought passage”.
She said: “As a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh, The Promise delivers. This is a book about legacies, those we inherit and those we leave, and in awarding it this year’s Booker Prize we hope it will resonate with readers in decades to come.”
The Promise is Galgut’s ninth novel. Told through the device of four funerals, it features a poor Afrikaaner family whose matriarch makes a deathbed request that their black maid be given the deeds to a house on their land - a wish that the family do not want to fulfil.
'Prize lists are problematic in all sorts of ways'
Galgut was shortlisted for The Good Doctor in 2003 and In A Strange Room in 2010. In a recent interview, the South African writer, 57, said that those nominations changed his fortunes but added: “Prize lists are problematic in all sorts of ways and there’s such a frenzy surrounding this particular prize that one feels almost guilty benefiting from it.
“I don’t cope that well with big public events or too much attention, so both shortlistings probably shaved a few years off my life.” Asked if it might be easier a third time, he replied: “It’s all a lottery.”
The Booker win should bring a significant sales boost. The book has so far sold just shy of 9,000 copies in hardback.
The £50,000 prize money will be welcome. Galgut broke off mid-way through work on The Promise after being offered a film script, which he accepted because he needed the money.
He also lost a significant sum when a Cape Town restaurant he co-owned closed due to the pandemic, leaving him liable for the bills and staff salaries.
Accepting the prize, Galgut said: “It’s taken a long while to get here and now that I have, I kind of feel that I shouldn’t be here. This could just as easily have gone to any of the other amazing, talented people on this list and a few others who aren’t.”
He dedicated his win to fellow African writers: “All the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard, from the remarkable continent that I’m part of.”
Of the prize, he said: “It has changed my life and please know that I am really, profoundly, humbly grateful for this.”
Galgut said he had tried to make the book funny in parts, despite critics often claiming he has no sense of humour. “It’s funny, at least to me,” he said.
Speaking after accepting the award, Galgut admitted to worries that the attention brought by the win would have a negative effect on his writing.
He said: "It's a worry. Most writers require solitude - many hours of it to work properly. Even the relatively limited attention that has come to me in recent years has eaten into that. So, yeah, it is a concern."
